2006 Tucker/Cohen Dissertation Prize
The 2006 Tucker/Cohen Dissertation Prize, sponsored by the JKW Foundation, is presented for an outstanding English-language doctoral dissertation defended at an American or Canadian university in the tradition of historical political science and political history of the Soviet Union as practiced by Robert C. Tucker and Stephen F. Cohen.
Heather Diane DeHaan
The 2006 Tucker/Cohen Dissertation Prize was awarded to Heather Diane DeHaan, who received her PhD in History from the University of Toronto in June 2005 and is currently Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
Professor Dehaan's doctoral dissertation, "From Nizhnyi to Gorkii: The Reconstruction of a Russian Provincial City in the Stalinist 1930s," explores the effort to turn "merchant" Nizhnyi Novgorod, a well-known center of imperial Russian trade, into the "socialist" city of Gorkii from 1928 to 1941, through a detailed reconstruction of urban planning during this period. The work is based on informed and meticulous research in Russian provincial and central archives, as well as in an ambitious body of relevant published sources. It is elegantly written and conceptually exciting. Many young scholars can do solid archival research; some can produce big ideas; but only a very few are as capable as Dehaan of bringing together the quotidian and metaphysical seamlessly, compellingly, and with such a high level of sophistication. "From Nizhnyi to Gorkii" sheds fresh light, during the Stalin years, on such issues as evolving relations between the center and periphery, professionalization and identity formation, cities as places of lived socialism, the mobilization of pre-revolutionary rituals and ways of thinking in support of Soviet ideals, the role of pragmatism and inertia in socialist construction (or lack of it), and the complexities of state and local politics then. A truly original, distinguished doctoral dissertation, it provides a solid and altogether promising foundation for a genuinely important first book.
